Hey,
Does anyone here have any actual user experience with genuine fractals? If you've actually used it yourself, in your opinion, does it work OK, good, great, unbelievably well? Their info on their web site sounds good, but looking for some input besides the sales hype. Thanks for any opinions!
I like Qimage for upsizing. And it is pretty affordable too, at $44.95.
A visual comparison of various resizing algorithms available here. (Newer programs/updates are towards the bottom.) Although there are no samples of Genuine Fractals 4.0, notice at the top it says "Genuine Fractals 3.5 is now available. Test results using the 8 bit test images below showed no noticeable differences from 3.0. The benefit of 3.5 over 3.0 is support for 16 bit images. Genuine Fractals 4.0 is out. The interpolation algorithm remains the same. The difference between 3.5 and 4.0 is improvements in workflow." So the GF 3.0 samples should still be a good indicator of how the latest version of GF would also look.
An alternative to Genuine Fractals is to use Photoshop CS's bicubic smoother. It works VERY well and I think it rivals GF. They say that you can rez up in one shot, but I usually raise in steps (10-15% increments at a time)
An alternative to Genuine Fractals is to use Photoshop CS's bicubic smoother. It works VERY well and I think it rivals GF. They say that you can rez up in one shot, but I usually raise in steps (10-15% increments at a time)
Try it before you buy GF.
Hmm... I'd question how good a simple bicubic resize is past a certain point - however, you can try GF before you buy it too, they have a use-limited demo available.
An alternative to Genuine Fractals is to use Photoshop CS's bicubic smoother. It works VERY well and I think it rivals GF. They say that you can rez up in one shot, but I usually raise in steps (10-15% increments at a time)
Try it before you buy GF.
Hmm... I'd question how good a simple bicubic resize is past a certain point - however, you can try GF before you buy it too, they have a use-limited demo available.
It certainly convinced me :)
It's not the "simple bicubic" algorithm being referenced here -- since version 8/CS, Photoshop has included two new algorithms -- Bicubic Sharper and Bicubic Smoother -- which are supposed to be much more effective than the old Bicubic.
I've tried photoshops bicubic interpolator, in all 3 flavors, smooth, normal, and sharp. I was not all that impressed with them, that's why I was wondering about GF. Not to say the bigger versions from photoshop were BAD, just that I thought they could be BETTER some. But they certainly looked good. I was just exploring anything better out there. I'm trying to upsize about 180%, and I did it in steps of 110% until I got there.
When you guys upsize something significantly like this, do you usually run it thru a noise reduction program like NeatImage first? Or after it's upsized? Or both before AND after? I forgot to use my NeatImage on it at all, and was wondering if that might have been part of why I was disappointed with the photoshop bicubic resize... I'm going to go back and do my test again with NI to see if it makes a difference...
That said, I went to the link provided by EddyG showing the different upsizing algorithms, and I have to say that I was not all that impressed by GF or Qimage versus the bicubics either... But perhaps that was because they were blowing stuff up about 600% with GF (and all the others there). So maybe for my "small" 180% increase, GF or Qimage would do a fantastic job. GF looks like it divided things in to "regions", rather than individual pixels. It looked more "blocky" if you know what I mean...
One other question, GF says on their web site that it only works with photoshop CS, not yet with photoshop CS2. So from that I take it that it is a photoshop pluggin, and does NOT run as a standalone program? Is that correct?
I tried GF the other day to try and get them up at 48mb and I have to say that at 100% they looked pretty awful. Is that normal or did I just do something really terrible? Of course 100% straight out of the cam dont look great either but with GF it looks like I used a bad PS watercolor effect or something.
moodville, yeah, that's exactly what someone else here said when looking at the samples from EddyG's site, that the GF ones looked like "watercolors". Could I ask you what % you were trying to scale yours up? I'm trying to get about 180% upsizing. If you were in that same ballpark, that would be most interesting to me. Thanks.
I have been sizing images taken on a Nikon D70 up to 48 MB too and not had any problems but... upsampling is very unforgiving.
It might be down to problems with the original - sometimes colour noise isn't such a big deal at native size but is really obvious once upsampled.
I'm not neatimaging (before or after) nor am I applying any sharpening so I'm yet to see whether Alamy find the results acceptable but I'm happy with most of mine. There have definitely been some that I've scrapped though as the upsizing has made flaws in the original much too obvious.
Of course 100% straight out of the cam dont look great either ...
Since upsizing involves creating new pixels based on the values of the existing ones, it is imperitive that photos you plan to scale up be as sharp and noise free as possible, because otherwise all the noise and defects are what's used to create the new pixels. Never is the programmer's motto of GIGO more applicable than to upsampling an image.
Therefore, it also makes sense to use noise-reduction first. Whether you need to use it later depends on the results of your processing, you have to look at it : )
If you are using GF, there should be no reason to use the step-interpolation method; you buy the program to avoid that.
AFAIK, GF is available as both a plug-in and as a standalone program.
Fred Miranda (www.fredmiranda.com) sells Stair Interpolator and Resize Pro. I have been using SI Pro for some time now and it is stunningly good at a small fraction of the cost of GF. Resize pro is supposed to be even better, but it's camera-specific with profiles for various dSLR mnodels, and I don't have one of those, so...
The reason I went the Fred Miranda route is that I saw quite a few reviews saying the same thing: that FM's interpolation route using PS bicubic actually produced better results than GF. I saw samples that convinced me. I've been happy with the choice I made.
Thanks for the info GeneralE. Yeah, after I was done I did a "DOH, I should have NeatImaged first!" thing. :-) I'll go try it again after doing that. Don't know if it will make much of a difference, as what I was a little disappointed with in PS's upsizing was the "softness" rather than noise. But it can't hurt, right? :-)
But if GF will do a BETTER job than PS by itself, I'd like to do that instead. So I was just wondering if GF was worth the extra cost... The examples of GF on EddyG's link didn't look soft (a good thing), but they looked "blocky" to me (a bad thing). Others have called them a "watercolor" effect...
I think I'm going to try GF's download trial to see how it works for me. If it's good, I'll get it.
Fred Miranda (www.fredmiranda.com) sells Stair Interpolator and Resize Pro. I have been using SI Pro for some time now and it is stunningly good at a small fraction of the cost of GF. Resize pro is supposed to be even better, but it's camera-specific with profiles for various dSLR mnodels, and I don't have one of those, so...
The reason I went the Fred Miranda route is that I saw quite a few reviews saying the same thing: that FM's interpolation route using PS bicubic actually produced better results than GF. I saw samples that convinced me. I've been happy with the choice I made.
Robt.
I've used SI for a long time as well. I recently bought his new Resize Pro, but to be honest, I think I still prefer SI. I don't know why Resize Pro is camera-specific either. I was expecting it would somehow be much better than SI but when I compare side by side enlargements, I keep leaning towards SI.
I have both GF and Fred Miranda's SI. In side by side comparison, I prefer SI, wish I would have known about it before I purchased GF I could have saved a lot of money.
I just went and looked at SI and Resize Pro on fredmiranda, and wow! I have to say that the examples of resize pro for my camera at 200% (and I'm going to 180% so that's real close...) looked far better than the PS CS examples they had. They didn't have any GF examples, but for the price difference they looked good enough I just went ahead and bought resize pro!
I also downloaded the GF trial demo. I'll give them both a try and see which one I like better tonight if I can. But GF will have to be a WHOLE LOT better than resize pro in order to justify the $130 price difference!
Thanks a whole bunch for pointing that software out to me bear_music! You probably just saved me $130!! :-)
Resusit8u, thanks for that input. Glad I'm trying resize pro before buying GF!
In their examples on fredmiranda, resize pro looked just a touch better than SI to me. But hard to tell when comparing differnet photos etc in the two examples... But hey, I can get BOTH resize pro and SI and still save money over GF is I end up wanting to try SI in addition to resize pro... :-)
I just purchased a few other plug-ins from Fred Miranda, if you put "springfever" in the code box, you can get a 10% discount on your purchase. Hope you like Resize Pro.
DOH!! Already got resize pro, missed out on the "springfever" discount! Oh well, I still got a SERIOUS discount over GF!! :-) I'm happy. Now I just want to go home and try it out!
